Tag: Portal Walker

New features, more on the way… Twitch stream is poppin’!

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Howdy there Portal Walkers! I’ve been busy for the past few weeks adding new features at a furious pace! The first two Gathering Skills, Fishing and Mining, have been added and have been a really fun addition to the game so far. There’s not much you can do at the moment except gather a whole bunch of fish and ore, but the leader boards that I put up on my Twitch game development live stream have added a whole new dimension to this early testing phase of building the game! The other day I was hanging out by Seaside Village and four or five players were competing for the available fishing spots, to the point that some of them were getting in fights and killing each other! Working as intended.

I also managed to add an item storage vault to the banks in the game, all without giving up and deciding to sell my computer to live forever in a remote shack in the Australian outback! With all the fish and ore players were stocking up on, they needed more room to store their stuff, and do I not give the people what they want? So feel free to make some space in your bag, because a ton of new items will be coming soon!

I’m currently working on bringing Crafting Skills to Portal Walker, starting with the Cooking crafting skill, pretty much because it will have the least amount of recipes at the start (the only thing to cook right now are fish), which made it the ideal candidate for the first system to build the core crafting system around. I think it’s going to take me at least a few more days than I had originally anticipated to get Cooking ready and have players gathering around the fire for the biggest fish fry Portal Walker has ever seen, but I can guarantee it will be worth it! The new crafting system is going to be EPIC!

Other than that, being back on Twitch has been a blast! Old viewers returned at a surprising and heartwarming pace, and new viewers have been trickling in at record pace! Twitch viewers are starting to pitch in here and there, which is awesome! Portal Walker fishing fanatic HydralisQue has started to put together a Portal Walker Wiki page, so if you know your stuff you can head over there to help out and add to the wiki, and new players can pop over to the wiki if they need help finding something. Way to go! I’ve also been trying to be a little more active on the official Portal Walker Twitter and Facebook pages, and particularly plan on using Twitter as the primary place users can check for the latest updates regarding Portal Walker when I’m not streaming or available in game. One day I’ll display the latest news somewhere inside the game, but for now Twitter is the easiest thing for me to update at any time, from anywhere.

Speaking of which, I’m taking the next day or two off to go fishing. In real life. I’ll try and get some work done on the game during the downtime, specifically I plan on grabbing a new pen and notebook before I head up to the lake. I think it’ll be a good opportunity to get a bunch of my ideas down on paper, as well as come up with some new ones. Try not to break the server until I get back! And big time thanks to all the awesome people that have been playing Portal Walker and supporting my Twitch stream! You guys make it all worth it!  <3

Back from hiatus…

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I haven’t worked on Portal Walker for the past few months. I feel bad about that, but I feel bad about a lot of things, so what is a boy to do? In an attempt to feel less bad, I’ve resumed work on the game! In the past 24 hours I’ve gotten back to work and added a few new features, most notably the first building and shop NPC have been added to the game. The Inn and the Inn Keeper! The Inn serves in two ways… for a small bit of gold, a rest at the inn restores your character’s Hit Points to the maximum, and also binds your character to the Inn so that you will respawn there should you succumb to a vicious red slime during your adventures.

In other news, I’ve decided to focus on adding features while using place-holder art for everything new. Making my own art was too time consuming and was a major factor in becoming burned out on working on the game. Programming and game design are overwhelmingly my cup of tea, so I’m going to stick to those for now and worry about getting an artist some time down the road. In that spirit, hopefully there will be much more to do and see in Portal Walker over the coming weeks!

Long time, no update…

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Or at least, the blog hasn’t been getting updated. Portal Walker has been coming along just fine. Since my last post I’ve gotten the server online, created the initial version of the combat and leveling systems, added a bunch of other features, and put in the first monsters you can fight… SLIMES! Be careful though, PvP is enabled! Oh, and you lose half of your gold when you die. Sorry.

Right now Portal Walker is an unnecessarily difficult game. So far I’ve gotten my character to level 10 and that was over the course of tons of play testing and slime slaughtering. And many, many deaths. This is entirely due to there not yet being any mechanic to heal yourself, my bad. Don’t worry though, I wont leave you hanging! Soon you’ll be able to recover your hit points without sacrificing yourself, promise.

That said, I’m sad to say that  there will not be any new major features rolling out over the next couple of weeks. I feel that Portal Walker has gotten to the point that I need to figure out what I’m going to do about the art before I can work on anything else, so that means I need to learn how to become an artist. I’m working pretty hard getting myself up to snuff as quickly as I can, and am actually really happy with my results so far, but it’s still a fairly slow-going process. I don’t want to get stuck having to put a lot of time into stripping out placeholder art assets down the road, and since I’m not hiring an artist I’d have to get around to learning how to do this stuff at some point anyway. Wish me luck, and kill those slimes!  <3

Aaaaaand… It’s Gone.

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So much for using ElectroServer to power the back-end for Portal Walker, or any game for that matter. Turns out that Electrotank, the company that created ElectroServer, was purchased by some lame casino game company that doesn’t appear to be interested in supporting ElectroServer or supplying new licenses for it. It’s a damn shame because it was by far my favorite server technology to work with.

With that behind me, I’m currently looking into using SmartFoxServer 2X, which has always been ElectroServer’s chief competitor. Pretty much the only reason I’ve never used SFS2X is because I was already familiar with ES5, fortunately it looks like SFS2X has some goodies and advantages that are making it a little less painful to make the switch. For one, the company that sells SFS2X is still in business, that’s a good start. They’ve also added some features specific to MMO-style games that look like they’ll be very helpful in creating the Portal Walker server. However, I’m still stuck where I was with ES5, as there is also no native Haxe client API for SFS2X, but the silver lining is that the AS3 client API for SFS2X is about half the size of the ElectroServer AS3 client API, which would hopefully translate into taking half the amount of work to port it to Haxe.

While I’ve been waiting to hear back from the internet about what I should do regarding the server situation, I started looking into procedural world generation for a 2D tilemap-based world and am getting ready to start working on the world generator for Portal Walker. Randomly generated worlds will be an important part of Portal Walker, but I want to note that the game world will not be entirely procedurally generated, so don’t expect something like Minecraft or Terraria. The only real news is that it looks like I’m going to have to write my own map generator from scratch. It looks like it will be fun, but I literally started to have a migraine while looking over info about Base64 encoding and zlib compression in preparation for how I plan on storing map data. Programming is very much so a headache sometimes.

Schoooooooool’s out… for… THE SUMMER!

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I’ve had to put down working on games for the past few days to wrap up finals and the spring semester at school. After grinding through all of that, I think I’m going to spend the day relaxing and digging into a game I haven’t played before. You know, have a little fun.

On the Portal Walker front, the breaking news that no one is yet interested in is the fact that I am starting to have concerns about porting the ElectroServer 5 Client API to Haxe, the main concern being that I have no idea what I am doing. However, I still have made a lot of progress in drudging through the grunt work of porting the meat of the code from AS3 to Haxe syntax. I really could use some help from someone who understands the more complex functions of both languages and can look over the code and figure out solutions to port some of the trickier elements. I’ve begun dabbling with this myself (such as replacing AS3 Dictionaries with Haxe Maps, which I’m not even sure works or is a good idea), but the time I’m investing in it is starting to surpass the threshold of confidence I have in myself, so I’ve started the process of trying to get some help.

If it turns out that there is simply no feasible way for me to get a HaxeFlixel client interfacing with an ES5 server on all desired target platforms, my current backup plan is to use ES5 for the server and create the client in Starling and AS3. The huge downside would be losing access to the Flixel framework and having to code a lot of the client game engine from scratch, as well as a higher potential to run into performance issues down the road due to Starling apps running on top of Adobe AIR instead of compiling natively for each platform as they would if I were able to build the client in Haxe. First world problems, man.

ES5 as3 client API to Haxe porting madness!!!

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So the main reason I’ve had to shelf working on the client is because I really don’t want to put a lot of work into it until it is interfacing with the server, primarily because the client is going to be receiving most of the information it needs about the game world from the server. On the projects I’ve worked on in the past, getting a client connected to the game server has been a snap when working with ElectroServer 5 and the ActionScript 3 client API library provided for it. Soon after setting up a fresh install of ES5 to begin creating a server for the Portal Walker client, it dawned on me that a Haxe client API library for ES5 doesn’t exist! Or, at the very least, I can’t find it.

After spending a brief moment looking into alternative server solutions, of which the closest I came to selecting was node.js, I decided the best course of action might be to roll up my sleeves and take a shot at porting the ES5 as3 client API to Haxe. Not only would this (theoretically) allow all of the various platforms I plan on targeting for Portal Walker to share the same netcode, if I am able to do this successfully I think it will have been one heck of a learning experience, not to mention something that can be of value to others.

I’ve been putting a lot of hours into porting all of the parts of the library that are essential for running a simple “Hello World” demo, and am pretty sure I have quite a long way to go until I get there. However, should I get a working demo going, I definitely plan to put my work up on GitHub to open it up to the community and the folks at Electrotank in the case that anyone else out there wants to work on it. I should probably have the first version of the complete library port finished by the time someone else becomes interested in taking a look at it, which would be pretty good timing considering I have very little faith in everything actually working by that point and will probably end up needing a hand. I never, ever, thought I’d be a contributor to an open source project, let alone be the creator and primary contributor, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Anyway, the People Powered Games coding stream has been EXTREMELY BORING since I started this porting project, which is an extraordinary thing to say about a stream where you already knew you were in for watching a guy sit there and type away at his keyboard. My process has been to run the as3 library though a useful tool called as3hx, which converts as3 scripts to Haxe scripts. Unfortunately, it’s a little rough around the edges and most files require quite a bit of fixing up before they resemble both working and human-readable Haxe code. Needless to say, combing file after file, line by line, to ensure that everything converted correctly has been a long and arduous task, and I’m not even close to having enough finished to test a demo of “Hello World”! I just hope that when I get there this actually works and I didn’t end up wasting a few days on something someone could have probably told me wouldn’t work if I had the gall to make a few forum posts. Sigh.

First Post!

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Hello world! My name is Mike and I’m a one-man indie game developer trying to make my dreams happen (and by extension, as the players, your dreams!) Right now, that dream is to create a super awesome MMORPG that will undoubtedly become the final nail in the coffin of that big subscription game with all the pandas and off-shore gold farmers. (NOTE: I’m currently having a ton of fun leveling up my Pandarish HandFist-Class character in that game.) Anyway, my game is basically going to be in open testing from the very first playable version, because why not? You can check out the latest build of the Flash version of the game by clicking on the Portal Walker tab from the top menu, or by clicking this conveniently placed link.



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Unfortunately, it will probably be quite some time before any major updates are added to the client due to some major work needed to get the situation under control with the game server. So for now, you’ll have to be content with the extreme running into and hiding behind bushes gameplay provided by the inaugural open alpha version of the game that is up now. It’s so alpha, IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A VERSION NUMBER!